HIGH SCHOOL BOYS BASKETBALL: Lawrenceville roughs up Peddie

LAWRENCEVILLE — The 16 points and 10 rebounds which Lawrenceville School senior boys basketball player Roy Brooks hauled in yesterday showed how strong his play with the ball was, yet it was the play off the ball by Brooks and his teammates which turned a showdown for top seed in the Mid-Atlantic Prep League into a rout.

Led by Brooks’ inspired play in the absence of top scorer Sam Borst-Smith (appendectomy), the Big Red filled the lanes, doubled down and boxed out as well as they have all season to hand the Falcons a 64-44 setback at Lavino Fieldhouse.

The victory keeps Lawrenceville (13-3) unbeaten in MAPL play this season and earns the Big Red the top seed for the MAPL Tournament at Peddie Feb. 8-10.

Brooks, a 6-foot-7 senior forward, turned in his best game of the season against Peddie’s 6-7 postgraduate forward Wes Dickinson. With Brooks pressuring from behind and guard Matt Johnson collapsing in front, the Big Red made it hard for the Falcons to get the ball in to their 17.3-points-per-game scorer.

Lawrenceville paid equal attention to Peddie’s postgraduate point guard DeAndre Noble-Haywood, and limited the 20.9-points-per-game scorer to 12 points. He was the only Falcon to reach double figures.

“As a team, they played great defense, and they threw a lot of different looks at us,” said Dickinson, a Bergenfield native who played his last four years at Dwight-Engelwood High. “They used a man-to-man to come back in the first half, then switched to a zone at the beginning of the second half, which threw us off.”

And while Peddie expected ferocity from the Big Red in such a big game on their home floor, the play of Roy Brooks exceeded the expectations of some as he set a season-high for points.

“Roy cares so much about this team,” L’ville head coach Ron Kane said. “He always brings his best effort.”

“Roy Brooks did a great job at both ends of the floor,” Falcons head coach Joe Rulewich said. “More than the points or the rebounds, it was the space he provided his teammates.”

“I didn’t need to know much about their big man,” Brooks said of Dickinson. “I just needed to stay strong and play my hardest. I can’t make it easy on anyone I play against.”

The same was true of his teammates, who appeared to be getting caught focusing on Peddie’s biggest players in the early going when George Langberg and Chris Glazer combined to hit four 3-point field goals to put the visitors in front, 12-4.

But the Big Red rallied to take a 15-14 lead when Johnson led George Giannos for a layup with 1:14 to go in the quarter. Even though a reverse layup by Dickinson, his only basket until the fourth quarter, gave the Falcons a 16-15 lead heading into the second period, the home team came back to build a 26-18 advantage on consecutive scores by Brooks.

“Sam’s absence gave us great motivation,” said Brooks, whose namesake was a 1,118 scorer at St. Anthony’s (now TCA) back in the late 1970s. “It was sad not to have him with us, but we talked to him on the phone before and after the game, so he was still with us.”

“Whenever you lose a good soldier like that, everybody’s got to pick it up somewhere,” Kane said. “We rallied together.”

With Roy Brooks serving as the focal point, the Big Red got plenty of inspired play all around to break the game wide open in the third quarter when they outscored the Falcons, 22-8. Brooks, who stayed out of foul trouble until the fourth quarter, had eight of his points and six of his rebounds in the third period.